Art & Creativity Quote by Ava DuVernay

DuVernay’s line is a quiet dare to anyone who treats film as either escapist entertainment or elite gallery fare. She frames art as a chain reaction: first “minds,” then “hearts,” then “policy.” That order matters. It’s a director’s argument that narrative is upstream from legislation, that culture sets the terms of what a public can even imagine as just, urgent, or possible. She’s not romanticizing inspiration; she’s describing a lever.

The repetition of “I believe” does two things at once. It’s conviction, but it’s also a concession that this faith is still contested. DuVernay has spent her career working in the space where art is constantly asked to justify itself politically: Selma translating history into a national argument about voting rights; 13th reframing mass incarceration as continuity rather than aberration; When They See Us making “case details” into lived trauma the viewer can’t file away. Her subtext is that facts alone don’t move democracies; stories do, because stories recruit empathy, and empathy recruits attention, and attention becomes pressure.

“Change policy” is the most provocative phrase because it refuses the fashionable separation between aesthetics and activism. She’s also speaking to the machinery behind art: distribution, platforms, awards, classrooms, social media. Art doesn’t float above power; it travels through power. DuVernay’s intent is to claim that terrain, and to insist that filmmakers can be participants in civic life without apologizing for it.